Myanmar’s most famous comedian, Zaganar, who has been leading deliveries of aid to survivors of Cyclone Nargis, has been arrested at his Yangon home, a relative said yesterday.
“He was arrested last night. About 10 people came to get him at his place,” said the relative, who was staying in the same apartment in the former capital at the time of Zaganar’s arrest.
She said she did not know why the comedian was arrested, but added that electronic equipment and about US$1,000 were also seized.
Zaganar had been briefly detained along with top actor Kyaw Thu during anti-government protests last year. Those ended with a junta crackdown which left at least 31 people dead, the UN has said.
British human rights organization Amnesty International told a press conference in Bangkok yesterday that they had also confirmed his arrest.
“His house was raided and a number of CDs were taken from his apartment,” said Benjamin Zawacki, Amnesty’s Southeast Asia researcher.
“He’s currently being interrogated by a major general in the western district of Yangon... we have no further information at the moment,” he said.
The comedian has been helping volunteers deliver food, shelter and clothing to victims of Cyclone Nargis, which left more than 133,000 people dead and missing when it slammed into the southwest delta on May 2 to May 3.
The military regime has been criticized for blocking foreign relief supplies to about 2.4 million people affected by the storm.
Local volunteers have been trying to fill the void, heading down to the delta with cars laden with private aid.
But some have reported being blocked and prevented by the army from distributing the supplies, despite the government’s insistence in its New Light of Myanmar newspaper that citizens were free to hand out aid.
Meanwhile, Southeast Asian aid experts flew into Myanmar’s devastated Irrawaddy Delta yesterday for a mission to assess cyclone damage, but US navy ships sailed away — laden with supplies rejected by the junta.
Nearly five weeks after Cyclone Nargis hit, leaving 133,000 dead or missing, the first members of the joint ASEAN-UN “Emergency Rapid Assessment Team” flew by helicopter into the shattered towns of Labutta and Pyapon.
The 200-strong team of aid experts from the ASEAN and the UN were to begin moving into remote areas of the delta, where entire villages were washed away in the storm, ASEAN Secretary-General Surin Pitsuwan said in a statement.
Their final findings will not be reported until the middle of next month, even as the UN estimates that 1 million hungry and homeless survivors have yet to receive any international assistance.
Myanmar has agreed in theory for 10 helicopters from the World Food Programme to ferry supplies into the region, but so far only one is actually flying.
The junta has rejected help from US, French and British warships. Four US ships left the area yesterday, after three weeks of trying to convince the regime to accept their aid.
Lieutenant General John Goodman, commander of Marine forces Pacific, said that even though the USS Essex group was leaving, the US was still ready to offer Myanmar helicopters and landing craft from the amphibious ships.
Myanmar has accused the US of offering aid with unspecified “strings attached.” The generals — always suspicious of the outside world — have long harbored fears of a US invasion.
The junta agreed to allow Southeast Asian nations to coordinate the relief effort, and Surin said that the next two weeks would be “crucial for building international confidence in this joint mission” between ASEAN, the UN and the Myanmar government.
On the ground, hundreds of thousands of desperate survivors have been left to fend for themselves, cobbling together whatever shelter they can find to survive the daily monsoon rains while scavenging for food.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion